Two weeks ago we covered the news that the Mono development team were let go kicked out by the new owners of Novel, Attachmate, apparently to move operations to Germany. Miguel de Icazza, founder of Mono, has taken this opportunity to break off on his own and has started a new company, Xamarin, to bring commercial .NET development products to iOS and Android.

> Now he has decided to port Mono to iOS, a platform where the vendor
> has been extremely hostile to alternative development tools in the past
> and has a penchant for changing the rules with no recourse for
> developers.

Those were my first thoughts. .NET on Android? Go for it. .NET on iOS? Sounds like Apple is going to yank this as soon as it is popular enough to show up on their radar. The F.U.D. that developers experience about this (I certainly do) isn't going to help either.

That being said, even with all legal hassles and Apple control-mania aside, I'm confused over the value of .NET on either Android or iOS. Sure you can do it, and it will probably be comfortable for a seasoned .NET developer trying to build apps on either system.

But how up-to-date will this be compared to the native frameworks? What about quality? I am certainly convinced that .NET is one of the top-quality development frameworks out there, surpassing Java in many (but not all) areas. But on Android and iOS, it would be a portable-rather-than-tailored framework torn between supporting the native functionality and still being .NET, while the native APIs provide exactly the intended functionality.

Last but not least, .NET is strong in desktop and server development, and there's still a lot of money to be made, even with Microsoft already offering their stuff. I'd bet there are many existing and potential .NET-on-Linux systems out there; MS's .NET development tools could use some competition to catch up (seriously, they're still trying but failing to imitate Eclipse), and free .NET libraries and frameworks are still in their infancy compared to their equivalent for Java. Plus many Java developers have become cautious about Oracle's next big screw-up.